The materiality of music: interplay of lyrics and melody in song translation

Abstract

In this study, we use the concept of materiality to re-evaluate traditional approaches to song translation. Materiality conceptualises a text as a complex unity of matter, form, and meaning, and songs provide an example of the interconnectedness of a material text and its verbal content. In our analysis of Hank Williams' song Ramblin' Man and its Finnish translation, we utilise notation to illuminate the intricate relationship between the original melody and the translated lyrics. By showing how the Finnish song's lyrics and melody have been shaped to support one another, we demonstrate how different translation solutions are not just attempts to replicate the source text's meanings but factors in the interplay of language and its material medium. We argue that materiality enables an all-encompassing view on how different levels of meaning interact in a text and thereby allows translation studies to move beyond juxtapositions of semantic fidelity and interpretative adaptation.

Translate the Beauty in Songs: Jointly Learning to Align Melody and Translate Lyrics

“…Automatic lyrics translation has been approached by rulebased methods, statistical machine translation methods, finite-state methods with rhythmic and lexical constraints (Gervás, 2002;Manurung, 2004;He et al, 2012), and more recently by neural methods (Ghazvininejad et al, 2016(Ghazvininejad et al, , 2017(Ghazvininejad et al, , 2018. Tradi-tional song translation research has made progress in terms of lyrics translation and lyrics-melody alignment through linguistic knowledge (Haapaniemi and Laakkonen, 2019;Low, 2003Low, , 2008Low, , 2022Franzon, 2015;Desblache, 2018). Often, the object of these research was artificial songs.…”

“…Their direct use of text translation models and strict mapping between notes and tokens, however, is unable to capture the more involved nature of song translation. While the number of notes provides an easy upper bound on the length of translation, the delicate alignment between lyrics and melody, as observed in Haapaniemi and Laakkonen (2019), should not be dictated solely by simple rigid rules.…”

Translate the Beauty in Songs: Jointly Learning to Align Melody and Translate Lyrics

“…Automatic lyrics translation has been approached by rulebased methods, statistical machine translation methods, finite-state methods with rhythmic and lexical constraints (Gervás, 2002;Manurung, 2004;He et al, 2012), and more recently by neural methods (Ghazvininejad et al, 2016(Ghazvininejad et al, , 2017(Ghazvininejad et al, , 2018. Traditional song translation research has made progress in terms of lyrics translation and lyrics-melody alignment through linguistic knowledge (Haapaniemi and Laakkonen, 2019;Low, 2003Low, , 2008Low, , 2022Franzon, 2015;Desblache, 2018). Often, the object of these research was artificial songs.…”